Dais, just a hint. Kies never really closes unless you kill it in Task Manager. If you run it to install drivers, then run Odin, they conflict. Samsung has the driver at SAMSUNG_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones

Timber, let's start again. Does Odin recognize the phone and give you a port number (other than 0)? If it doesn't, it's a driver/Odin/microUSB port/cable problem. If it does, if you've updated to 4.4 you're going to have a problem.